Psychosocial Interventions for Chronic Pain in Women and Girls

Laura A. Payne is a clinical psychologist at McLean Hospital and Assistant Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. She received her undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and subsequently her PhD from Boston University Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders. During her graduate work, she was an initial co-developer and co-author of the Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders – a transdiagnostic cognitive-behavioral treatment for emotional disorders – and her dissertation focused on evaluating two key components of the Unified Protocol and applying them to individuals with obsessive-compulsive disorder. During her postdoctoral fellowship at the UCLA Pediatric Pain Program, she extended these concepts to the treatment of pain, adapting the Unified Protocol to address both pain and emotions (anxiety/depression) in a sample of adolescents with chronic pain.  Dr. Payne was awarded an NIH Postdoctoral National Research Service Award to understand the relationship of emotion regulation strategies to acute pain in children with chronic pain, and she was recognized for her work in 2010 with the UCLA Chancellor’s Award for Postdoctoral Research. She then continued to explore central nervous system pain mechanisms in adolescent girls and young adult women with menstrual pain, through both a UCLA Bridge Award and then through an NIH Career Development Award. She also received a UCLA Children’s Discovery and Innovation Institute Seed Grant to explore the feasibility and acceptability of a behavioral intervention for reducing pain catastrophizing in girls and young women with menstrual pain. Dr. Payne has since continued her research exploring centralized pain mechanisms involved in adolescents and adults with menstrual pain, including brain, behavior, psychological, and hormonal factors involved in the transition to chronic pain in this population. In 2019, she moved her lab to McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical School where she subsequently received additional NIH and Department of Defense grants to further her research. Clinically, Dr. Payne provides evidence-based psychological care to women with all types of chronic pain, with a particular focus on pelvic and genital pain.